When Dave mentioned his plan to return home we began to search for another apartment. He needed to go home and Lindsey and I didn’t feel safe on 22nd ave. without him and his Uzi. We found a nice one-bedroom apartment on 11th, ave. and 14th St. This was a more racially diverse area with many Hispanics and a vibrant business district. We made the move March 1st. But just before this I took her on a week long visit to L.A., to meet my father and stepmother Muriel. Then to San Diego to visit more friends and her uncle, a scholar. I have these brief notes:

“March 1st, Friday. Moved into new apartment. Lindsey very ill with food poisoning or flu the first night but both of us quite content with this pad and hopeful of our happiness here.

“Remember in S.D. in Lindsey’s uncle’s office at U.C. He taught English, I forget what. I asked if he had a set of Bayle’s encyclopedia and envied that he had one at home, a large, folio, eight volume set. He had many sets of older authors in his office, but few I would want. I asked him about dictionaries. He said he wouldn’t want Samuel Johnson’s, (the best), which immediately prejudiced me against him. My estimation of his intellect fell like the stock market did on ‘Black Friday’ and ended our conversation.

This trip marked the beginning of a new era in my life, the first of many trips over the next two years, with money in my pockets and time off. It marked the beginning of my antiquarian book hunting and collection. Up until now (except for the one rare edition of Ovid, bought for 60 dollars) I could only afford cheap, student books and volumes priced under twenty dollars. But now I had hundreds in disposable income and the rare bookshops of L.A. were my first target. L.A. had four or five good ones, S.D. none, S.F. two (by appointment only). L.A. was just as rich in old books as N.Y.C. for all I could see, though my searches were not thorough. Boston, Philly and Toronto were all mediocre. But hunting for old books is like anything else, you find them in the oddest places. I went to Paris and thought I’d find treasures there but I didn’t. Just a few along the river stalls. But I digress.

I didn’t record what books I bought on that first trip but over the course of the year I collected sets of finely crafted editions of the Classics, mostly small Elzevir’s from Amsterdam in the 17th century. A ten volume, complete Cicero, Pliny the elder in three volumes, a complete Buchanan, the ‘Tres Thomae’, a Grotius and others, all vest pocket sized books but the print in them so small I can no longer read them unless with ‘2X’ glasses.

In my college days I could read the smallest print and often did, for hours. I think I compromised my eyesight with that intensity back then, though the damage didn’t show up for years. These little books survived the wreck of my larger library in Puerto Rico. I’d left these little, valuable sets behind at my mother’s because they were so valuable and took up little space. Some books in my Puerto Rico collection (all those in English) I took to the very small Rincon library, as a donation to their shelves, just before I left in 1998. My fortunes had turned and I was leaving the island near broke and my house abandoned. So I had a strong premonition that I was leaving them forever.

My Latin and Greek and French volumes died a barbaric death, left in my empty house, visited by crackheads and homeless waifs for five years, just a few strewn pages on the floor when I finally went back in 2004 to sell the place. I wonder what those young wretches made of the hundred or so books I left behind, with no money to ship them home, books with strange characters in languages none of them could read. I suppose those pages lit fires or pipes. The Rincon library, (population 5000) has one of the best and most complete collections of Shakespeare’s works and commentaries in the Caribbean, thanks to me.

As I look back at the short journal entries from this period I can see that my spirits picked up with the move to 14th st,. They describe my extensive reading at the time. My entries are brief but every few days. Fights with Lindsey I’d now grown used to. They’re described in Latin on a page where one moment I’m expressing my delight in reading ‘Rollin’ or criticizing ‘Taine’. Their brevity is humorous.

“Magna proelia, porro bellum intestinum et atrox pridie cum L., eo ut consilias his novis aedibus derelinquerere fecit. Sed prospere evenit, pace redente et amor omnia vincens, multas post lacrimas, conquerationes, consolationes et basia.

“Huge fights, almost a gut-wrenching, horrid war of words with Lindsey yesterday, going so far that I even declared plans to leave this new household immediately. But it ended well, peace returning and love conquering all, after many tears, complaints, consolations, and kisses”.

We did have many good days, wandering the new streets (now safe), visiting bookshops and restaurants, hand in hand, two very different souls, desperately trying to make a love work that was doomed to fail.

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